Violating Our Most Fundamental Social Contract — Time

I finally found the time to sit down and Watch “What Time is It There,” the film Dr. Sexson loaned me. I think I put it off fearing some sort of John Cageian challenge to the patience (thirty minutes of filming an empty room, or something like that). I’m happy to report that is not the case in the least. This film is a highly entertaining two hours of dark comedy — yes comedy.
The story centers around a young Taipei street watch vendor whose father dies, triggering a whole array of Buddhist ritual. After he deposits his father’s ashes in a mausoleum, the young man returns to his portable watch business where a young woman, who is about to go “abroad,” begs him to sell her his personal watch. He explains that he is in mourning and that wearing the watch will bring her bad luck, according to Buddhist custom. The woman persists until he sells her the watch the next day just before she departs for Paris on mission that is never explained. The watch vendor immediately begins to obsess on the watch (or the young woman he sells it to; it’s never really clear). He calls around to find out what time it is in Paris and begins resetting clocks all over the place to Paris time. When his grieving mother discovers the clocks changed in their home, she thinks its the spirit of her late husband and begins to “live” on Paris time, serving dinner in the middle of the night.
The young man clearly does not buy into his mother’s religious fervor. When he discovers a cockroach in the kitchen, his mother implores him not to kill it out of concern that it could be the reincarnation of her husband. The young man promptly throws the cockroach into a fish tank, where the family’s giant pet carp gobbles it up. In a later scene, the mother has a heart-to-heart conversation with the carp, assuming it embodies the spirit of her dead husband.
The young man definitely devolves into a tricksterish sort of character, foiled by his own clock-setting tricks, throwing all aspects of his world — including the people around him — into chaos. I like the way the film cleverly plays with our notion of time, one of those artificial conventions — perhaps the most basic — that tricksters like to blow holes in. The film challenges one’s notion of time. Examined dispassionately, time is a rather odd pact that we strike with each other within a civilization and civilizations strike with each other. In an odd irony that’s been pointed out before but bears repeating, how strange it is that nation’s can engage in total, life-destroying warfare over what will be regarded as sometimes trivial disputes in hindsight, all the while able to agree on what time of day it is.
I'm sure I missed many of the subtleties of this engaging film. I'll watch it again some day when time permits. I highly recommend it — for pure entertainment, if not for enlightenment on trickster characters — as does the Village Voice film critic whose review I posted below.

Violating Our Most Fundamental Social Contract — Time

I finally found the time to sit down and Watch “What Time is It There,” the film Dr. Sexson loaned me. I think I put it off fearing some sort of John Cageian challenge to the patience (thirty minutes of filming an empty room, or something like that). I’m happy to report that is not the case in the least. This film is a highly entertaining two hours of dark comedy — yes comedy.
The story centers around a young Taipei street watch vendor whose father dies, triggering a whole array of Buddhist ritual. After he deposits his father’s ashes in a mausoleum, the young man returns to his portable watch business where a young woman, who is about to go “abroad,” begs him to sell her his personal watch. He explains that he is in mourning and that wearing the watch will bring her bad luck, according to Buddhist custom. The woman persists until he sells her the watch the next day just before she departs for Paris on mission that is never explained. The watch vendor immediately begins to obsess on the watch (or the young woman he sells it to; it’s never really clear). He calls around to find out what time it is in Paris and begins resetting clocks all over the place to Paris time. When his grieving mother discovers the clocks changed in their home, she thinks its the spirit of her late husband and begins to “live” on Paris time, serving dinner in the middle of the night.
The young man clearly does not buy into his mother’s religious fervor. When he discovers a cockroach in the kitchen, his mother implores him not to kill it out of concern that it could be the reincarnation of her husband. The young man promptly throws the cockroach into a fish tank, where the family’s giant pet carp gobbles it up. In a later scene, the mother has a heart-to-heart conversation with the carp, assuming it embodies the spirit of her dead husband.
The young man definitely devolves into a tricksterish sort of character, foiled by his own clock-setting tricks, throwing all aspects of his world — including the people around him — into chaos. I like the way the film cleverly plays with our notion of time, one of those artificial conventions — perhaps the most basic — that tricksters like to blow holes in. The film challenges one’s notion of time. Examined dispassionately, time is a rather odd pact that we strike with each other within a civilization and civilizations strike with each other. In an odd irony that’s been pointed out before but bears repeating, how strange it is that nation’s can engage in total, life-destroying warfare over what will be regarded as sometimes trivial disputes in hindsight, all the while able to agree on what time of day it is.
I'm sure I missed many of the subtleties of this engaging film. I'll watch it again some day when time permits. I highly recommend it — for pure entertainment, if not for enlightenment on trickster characters — as does the Village Voice film critic whose review I posted below.

Time (Clock of the Heart)

by J. Hoberman
January 9 - 15, 2002

What Time Is It There?
Directed by Tsai Ming-liang
Written by Tsai and Yang Pi-ling
Winstar Opens January 11 Existential slapstick? Epistemological comedy? Buddhist farce? Whatever it is, Tsai Ming-liang's witty, wistful new film, What Time Is It There?, is a temporal inquiry that shoulders its philosophical burden lightly.

One of the critical hits of the last New York Film Festival, What Time Is It There? is Tsai's most expansive feature to date. The poet laureate of Taipei alienation here integrates Paris into his particular planet—a ghost world populated by familiar presences. Just as in Tsai's four previous features, the director's alter ego, Lee Kang-sheng, plays an impassive, somewhat pained character named Hsiao-kang. Tsai further reprises the family constellation seen in The River, with Miao Tien and Lu Yi-ching appearing as Hsiao-kang's father and mother, and reunites his star with Chen Shiang-chyi, his girlish partner in one of The River's memorably disconnected love scenes.

A comic minimalist who wrings maximum emotional impact from his fastidiously composed action and acute sense of timing, Tsai opens up with a long stare at Hsiao-kang's life-battered father pulling on his cigarette, puttering around the frame, and then stolidly sitting down to eat his solitary meal. The viewer deduces that this middle-aged stoic has died when Tsai cuts to the expressionless Hsiao-kang in a car en route to the mausoleum. As in The River, Lee is more a presence than a performer—"in front of the camera Hsiao-kang is not required to perform," Tsai has explained. (To add to the documentary flavor, much of What Time Is It There? was shot, like Rebels of the Neon God and The River, in the actor's apartment.)

A watch vendor whose base of operations is an esplanade above downtown Taipei, Hsiao-kang is the straight man for whatever interactions come his way. He connects briefly with Shiang-chyi (Chen), who insists on buying his personal dual-time watch before she leaves for Paris. Hsiao-kang's halfhearted attempt to dissuade her—since he is in mourning, the timepiece will bring bad karma—has no effect. Shiang-chyi's desire for that specific watch is no more rational than the superstitious delusions pushing Hsiao-kang's grief-stricken mother to the edge of sanity. When a cockroach scuttles through the family kitchen, she becomes hysterically protective: "Don't kill it—it could be your father's reincarnation." Hsiao-kang's feeding the insect to the family's pet carp only ups the ante. Tracking the transmigration of souls, she crouches beside the tank, plaintively asking the fish if it is indeed her husband, swimming back to see her.

What Time Is It There? is filled with purposeful, if absurd, activity rendered gravely hilarious through Tsai's deadpan, distanced representation of extreme behavior. Forbidden by his mother to use the toilet for fear of startling his father's soul, Hsiao-kang is compelled to urinate into a plastic bag. Activities have an almost Warholian lack of affect. Hsiao-kang squats by his stand idly trying to smash the crystal of an unbreakable watch by swatting it against the metal guard rail. Everyone is either attempting to turn back the hands of time or else put their arms around a memory. As Hsiao-kang, apparently obsessed by his meeting with Shiang-chyi, takes to compulsively resetting clocks of all sorts to Paris time, so his mother dutifully gets up in the middle of the night to cook dinner on what she imagines is her dead husband's new phantom zone schedule.

As the non-French-speaking Shiang-chyi sits alone in a Paris café, Hsiao-kang consoles himself with a rented video of The 400 Blows, a movie Tsai has called his favorite. The scene shown is a doubly haunting one of the child Jean-Pierre Léaud furtively stealing a bottle of milk from outside a Paris door and hungrily gulping it down—enacting neediness with an immediacy that neither Hsiao-kang nor Shiang-chyi can muster. Even more alienated than Hsiao-kang's Taipei, her tourist Paris sometimes seems to be a figment of Taipei's imagination. At one point, she seeks refuge in a cemetery and encounters Léaud as a disheveled eccentric.

This evocation of inconsolable solitude and geographical dislocation has affinities to the melancholy globalism mapped out by the melodramas of European directors like Wim Wenders and Krzysztof Kieslowski. But Tsai is far more restrained in his filmmaking. His visual language is austerely economical. The interior lighting favored by cinematographer Benoît Delhomme generally emanates from a single source in a cramped space. Even the fades arise out of the action—Tsai cuts to black and a door opens. Given the absence of dialogue and the emphasis on expressive framing, Tsai would have made an outstanding silent filmmaker—as he himself suggests with an unexpected homage to Harold Lloyd.

Anachronism is the subject of the movie. Cutting back and forth between Paris and Taipei, What Time Is It There? proposes physical separation as a factor of time, rather than space, even as it appears to wonder just what "time" means. (Does the title refer to the movie's self-contained world?) Tsai's scenes are generally presented, without segmentation, as extended temporal chunks. Close-ups are used sparingly. As in the mature films of Yasujiro Ozu, the camera never moves unless it's hitching a ride in some vehicle.

Tsai's formalism fits his mordant view of human nature. A night of attempted contact—involving Shiang-chyi, Hsiao-kang, and his bereaved mother, in concert with assorted human and object partners—likely leaves everyone lonelier than they were before. But then, as a prelude to the movie's mysterious, poetic ending, Shiang-chyi inadvertently surrenders her baggage. The final scene, perfectly framing the action and presided over by a karmic Ferris wheel, represents a curious move from limbo to paradise.

Perhaps Buddhist, perhaps Christian, this mystical closer suggests that Tsai's characters have really been wandering between the worlds. That is, pace Gertrude Stein, they've been wandering here and there as if there really is a there there.

Do Falstaff and Prince Hal Team up as Trickster in Henry IV, Part I?

Like many storytellers, Shakespeare provided the occasional comic relief, even in the face of death and mayhem. Consider the character of Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I, a tale of a prince’s youthful indiscretion in the midst of the deadly intrigue of a civil war his father must fight to defend the throne that the prince is to inherit. Prince Hal’s behavior is an affront to all that is royal. He consorts with highwaymen for amusement and continuously indulges in the pleasures of the flesh to excess. His chief accomplice — or, perhaps more accurately, instigator — is Falstaff, who sports the “Sir” title of knighthood but who is anything but the chivalrous, courtly gentleman we associate with that title. Falstaff is fat, slovenly, self-indulgent, deceitful, and criminal in that he resorts to robbery to amuse himself and support his vices. But more than just comical, Falstaff is a sinister presence whose influence threatens to doom Hal’s royal destiny. In many ways, Falstaff personifies the mythic trickster, but he falls short on one count: one is hard put to find a single benefit or good, inadvertent or otherwise, that his actions produce — something that is characteristic of at least some trickster figures. But that particular tricksterish characteristic may be provided by Prince Hal, who is regarded by at least one scholar as the actual trickster in the play. On balance, there is a case to be made that it is the combination of Falstaff and Hal who perform the trickster function Shakespeare found necessary to incorporate in Henry IV, Part I.
William J. Hynes lists six characteristics of mythic tricksters, though he allows that the list is not exhaustive and that “While many specific trickster figures appear to have most of these characteristics, a particular figure may occasionally have only one or two” (45). Of the six, Falstaff is a virtuoso in two. He is an incorrigible “Deceiver and Trick-Player” (35), lying to suit any situation. One of his many deceitful ploys can be found in the scene where the mistress of the Boar’s Head Tavern demands payment from Falstaff for the food and drink tab he has run up. Falstaff turns the tables on her, accusing the mistress of having picked his pocket while he slept — a complete fabrication. And he is an inveterate “Situation Inverter,” with “the ability to overturn any person, place or belief, no matter how prestigious” (37). Consider Falstaff’s assessment of the knightly quality of honor in Act V, Scene 1, 132-141: “Can honor set a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honor? A word. What is in that word honor? ... Therefore I’ll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon ...”
Marc Grossman says the play “presents two perspectives which create the dramatic tension within the play, within and between the characters and within the audience. The first, the morally serious, is associated with the court and the nobility, while the second, the comic, with Falstaff and the tavern inhabitants. Prince Hal straddles both” (1). Falstaff’s perspective provides the trickster’s challenge to everything that is noble and dear to the English culture in which he finds himself. He puts on a groveling demeanor in the presence of nobility, while mocking all of its traditions behind the scenes. His only motivation is self-servitude. To him, truth is but a cheap commodity. In one of the plays most memorable sequences, Falstaff throws his lot in with the prince’s highwaymen gang in a plot to rob some travelers. In true tricksterish fashion, Falstaff becomes the butt of the enterprise when the prince and his friend Poins don disguises and steal from Falstaff and his abettors the spoils of their crime. When he again meets the prince in Act 2, Scene 4, Falstaff tells a wild tale of having lost the loot to a horde of attackers that multiplies steadily in number as he relates the events. When Prince Hal finally tells Falstaff that it was just he and Poins who took their booty and frightened them off, Falstaff — in true trickster fashion — feigns to have known all along and to have not resisted his assailants out of concern for the prince’s welfare. In this scene he reaches the height of tricksterish manipulation. In the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Falstaff was no coward, but pretended to be one merely for the sake of trying experiments on the credulity of mankind: he was a liar with the same object, and not because he loved falsehood for itself. He was a man of such preeminent abilities, as to give him a profound contempt for all those by whom he was usually surrounded, and to lead to a determination on his part, in spite of their fancied superiority, to make them his fools and dupes (200-201).
Falstaff provided Shakespeare with a vehicle for mocking and questioning the dusty old traditions that he — and his audiences — must have found suffocating at times. This is one of the most important functions of mythic tricksters.
Gus Van Sant’s interpretation of Henry IV, Part I, in the film My Own Private Idaho brings a more sinister dimension to Shakespeare’s play for modern viewers. Filmed in 1991 and set in contemporary Portland, Ore., and rural Idaho, the film portrays a mayor’s son who rejects his privileged upbringing for a gang of youths who trade homosexual favors for drugs. By substituting gay prostitution and rampant drug abuse for the robbery and drunken revelry of the play, the film shocks our sensibilities in ways the play doesn’t, but in ways that Prince Hal’s behavior may have shocked the sensibilities of Elizabethan theatergoers. The film makes much more vivid the acrimony between Hal and his father and adds a new dimension to the Falstaff (Bob Pigeon in the film), who is depicted as an aging refugee from the contemporary drug culture. It’s easy to read a sort of harmless jocularity into the shenanigans of Hal and his cohorts in the play. Their behavior comes across as far more sinister and menacing in the film. For example, when Falstaff enters the tavern and is goaded by Poins and Hal into grossly exaggerating the threat he and the other robbers faced when they were set upon by the disguised Hal and Poins, we tend to read the scene as purely comic. As acted in Idaho, though, the scene has a venomous tone of street-gang-like baiting on the verge of erupting into violence, a much more complex — and perhaps tricksterish — sort of drama.
Though Falstaff clearly exhibits tricksterish qualities, at least on scholar makes the case that it is Prince Hal who is Shakespeare’s trickster in the four plays (of which Henry IV, Part I, is the second) that deal with the rise of the House of Lancaster. At the end of Act I, Scene 2 in Part I, Hal delivers a soliloquy in which he tells himself (and the audience) that his dissipated lifestyle is just a ruse to create a false impression, so that when he “reforms” later and assumes his role as king, his true character will seem all the more admirable in contrast with the indiscretions of his youth. Paul V.A. Williams argues that when Hal fulfills this prophecy in Henry V, after he has ascended to the throne, “The trickster who announced his plans early in Henry IV, Part I, and who fulfils [sic] them in this play, is now ready to accept himself, and to be accepted, at face value” (80). Hal is widely regarded as enigmatic, but has traditionally been regarded as genuine and truly heroic after he mends his ways. Marc Grossman explains the Part I soliloquy as a mere rationalization on the part of a troubled youth: “[H]e is simultaneously striving to reassure himself of his fundamentally honorable nature and to persuade himself that the robbery and his ‘loose behavior’ generally merely temporarily obscure his true merit, rather than constitute something by which it should be judged” (6). Williams, however, is unconvinced. In Henry V, he writes, “Everything has fallen into place for Henry. The trickster has taken over the world of the play, and the trick has taken over the trickster” (82). Whether he is a Machiavellian conniver or a confused youth prone to rationalization, Prince Hal does acquit himself with honor on the battlefield at Shrewsbury at the end of Part I and helps contribute to the victory that preserves the throne for is father and his future. Perhaps this is an example of occasional good that can come from the action of tricksters.
Is Falstaff the archetypal trickster figure of the House of Lancaster tetralogy, or is it Prince Hal? Perhaps the playwright vented some of his tricksterish needs through both characters, for as Grossman says, “Shakespeare knows more ways of producing the effect of gray from black and white than simply by mixing the two together” (2).

Works cited

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “From Seven Lectures.” Henry IV, Part I. Ed. Maynard Mack. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998, 200-201

Grossman, Marc. “The adolescent and the strangest fellow: comic and morally serious perspectives in ‘1 Henry IV’.” Essays in Literature 22.n2 (Fall 1995): 170(26). InfoTrac OneFile. Thomson Gale. MSU Bozeman Library. 14 October 2005

Hynes, William J. “Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricksters: A Heuristic Guide.” Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Context, and Criticisms. Eds. William J. Hynes and William G. Doty. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1993, 33-45,

My Own Private Idaho. Dir. Gus Van Sant. Perf. Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix, William Richert, James Russo. New Line Cinema, 1991.

Shakespeare, William. Henry IV, Part I. Ed. Maynard Mack. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998.

Williams, Paul V. A. The Fool and the Trickster. Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield. 1979.

We All Need a Dose of Trickster Now and Then

I’ve expressed before my sense that tricksters in oral and written literatures (as well as other cultural phenomena) fulfill some basic need of the human psyche — more specifically, the need to rebel, to buck the system. Hyde gets at this on page 117 when he analyzes the Yoruba tale of Ajaolele and of the gods Eshu and Ifa: “if Ifa’s territory is one’s lot in life, then a story that begins with a man leaving his hometown leaves Ifa behind at the outset, for a man’s ‘hometown’ here stands for all the constraints of family, occupation, and temperament that constitute that lot in life.” I would contend that this is a (the?) primary function of tricksters. An outlet for the basic need in all of us to act out against all the expectations that hem us in. We see it in all artforms, in music and literature, film and other visual arts.
Where I’m having the most trouble connecting the dots, is how this meshes with Derrida’s deconstruction. My sense is that Derrida’s suggestion (through his recounting of the dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus) that writing takes on a sinister nature because of its separation from the “father” (author) and therefore is both dead and capable of taking on new meaning of its own, is akin to Hyde’s recounting of Marcel Duchamps valuing of chance in the creative act — specifically Duchamp’s reaction to what the accidental shattering had done to his painting “Large Glass”: “I like the cracks, the way they fall.... There is a symmetry in the cracking ... and there is more, almost an intention there, an extra — curious intention that I am not responsible for, a readymade intention, in other words, that I respect and love.”
Could Duchamps and Derrida be getting at the same thing — Duchamps with respect to intent in visual art and Derrida with respect to writing? Could Derrida be laying the groundwork for the case that all language is tricksterish — particularly once it is written, separated from its author and therefore open to any interpretation that a reader may want to read into it?

Trickster Figures Make the World a Better Place

My Life as a Fake succeeds in thoroughly blurring the line between truth and fakery, and therein lies its appeal. Seen through the eyes of Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglass, a name that suggests the quintessence of British pedigreed aristocracy, the plot line creates a stomach-churning vertigo of misplaced trust. I initially thought of Christopher Chubb as the trickster in this story. On further reflection, though, John Slater may more nearly qualify. Slater vacillates between warning Sarah to steer clear of Chubb (due to his alleged insanity) and offering to abet Sarah in the theft of McCorkle’s (or is it Chubb’s?) poetry. (And let’s not forget, it was Slater who convinced Sarah to make the trip to Malaysia — and subsequently financed it — on really no pretext at all.) This shiftiness reminds me of the ambiguity attributed to tricksters in the academic works we have been reading. Slater’s frequent presence in the periphery of the action taking place in the novel also seems consistent with characterizations of the trickster as operating on the margins.
By design or accident, Carey seems to have written some of the trickster’s qualities into Slater, who through his ambiguous actions keeps Sarah intensely interested in her quest — a quest that haunts the better part of her life. Sarah initially regards Slater as evil for the role he played in her mother’s suicide (a suspected romantic tryst that ends when Slater rejects Sarah’s mother). Slater absolves himself of blame when he tells Sarah the unspeakable truth, that in fact it was a gay dalliance on her father’s part that led her mother to take her own life. But is Slater telling the truth? I am highly suspicious.
In addition to embodying the good-evil contradictoriness of mythic trickster figures, Slater’s character functions as a challenge to social convention that tricksters so often pose. His attitude is highly mercenary toward his poetic art. The trip to Malaysia is paid for by a deal to do some writing for the television program Nova. This is an ethical affront to Sarah’s career as a literary editor, just as Slater’s frequently off-color behavior in public is an affront to the aristocratic veneer suggested by Sarah’s lengthy and hyphenated name. No matter how much we fight it, life presents an elaborate construction of expectations that really can’t be ignored. These expectations can be as suffocating as it is liberating to throw them off and act according to our appetites. Slater functions as a literary device that allows Carey to complicate his plot in ways that it could not be without the flouting of convention.
I think this is one of the primary functions of the trickster figure in many of its manifestations — the derision and dismissal of social convention. As Hynes an Doty suggest, “frequently the breaching and upending process initiated by tricksters in the challenges to the accepted ways of doing things highlights the possibilities within a society for creative reflection on and change of society’s meanings” (8). The film F is for Fake underscores this tricksterish function by erasing the lines between original and forgery and calling into question the need for, competence and essential authenticity of “experts” by exposing numerous occasions in which experts demonstrably got it wrong. I’m not sure who in the film said it, but a tantalizing issue was raised with words to the effect: Without fakes we would need no experts. Without experts there would be no fakes. I think this aspect of the trickster raises serious doubts about some of our icons of artistic reverence and, in doing so, opens up whole new worlds of possibility for the rest of us to create legitimate “art.”
My Life as a Fake author Peter Carey would almost certainly have a problem with my interpretation of the book and Slater in particular. In interviews, Carey never uses the word trickster; the concept probably never entered his mind when he wrote the book. He also expresses frustration when reviewers read literary designs into the novel that Cary says are simply not there. But, as we all know (some of us having learned more recently than others), authorial intent is highly suspect as the correct reading (or even one of several) of any text. In other words, I think Carey may have created something of value in My Life as a Fake that he perhaps never intended to — as have many other creators of fiction. The recurrence of the trickster figure in literature written and oral across space and time perhaps speaks to the universal need in the human psyche to tear down the “churches” we erect in the name of art and artists. (Speaking of which, what was the significance of the long, somber sequence in the film during which Orson Welles spoke of the cathedral at Chartres as one of the greatest artistic achievements humanity can claim and yet was created by artisans who will forever remain anonymous? Was he merely diminishing the role of the artist in the creation of art, as he did with the fictitious “fake” who created original art but borrowed Picasso’s name to put on it? Or was the choice of the cathedral an effort to call attention to the supernatural reverence we sometimes afford artists?)
Slater, Chubb and McCorkle all exhibit aspects of the trickster — Chubb through his slovenly living conditions and self-destructive acts, McCorkle through his monsterish physical appearance and seemingly psychotic behavior. I think Carey chooses to write these aspects of the trickster into his characters as a way of complicating the intrigue in his story. They allow him to illustrate the pervasive deception and misunderstanding that characterize all human relations. Though at times vexing, it is these aspects of human relationships that making the human experience the fascinating, mesmerizing thing that it is. It is the element of the trickster in all human dealings that makes life better, more worth living.

Fools Crow's Trickster

When first introduced to the trickster figure in Literary Theory and Practice last year (in Gerald Vizenor’s Fugitive Poses), I assumed that the talking animals in James Welch’s Fools Crow would qualify. The more I learned, though, particularly of the unsavory (vulgar, obscene, scatological) aspects of tricksters, the more I thought this was just not the case. Welch’s talking animals were just too benign, too interested in guiding Fools Crow, the 18-year-old Blackfeet brave at the center of the story, in the right way. But I came across my copy of the book recently and located the passages in question. Now, in the case of Raven, I’m changing my mind again.
Consider this dialogue when Fool’s Crow (then known as White Man’s Dog) first meets Raven:

“[Raven] was sitting on a branch one of the delicate quaking leaf trees not fifty paces ahead. ‘You do not need your weapon, young man. There is nothing here to harm you.’
“White Man’s Dog felt his eyes widen, and his heart began to beat like a drum in his throat. Raven laughed the throaty laugh of an old man. ‘It surprises you that I speak the language of the two leggeds. It’s easy, for I have lived among you many times in my travels. I speak many languages. I converse with the blackhorns and the real-bears and the wood-biters. Bigmouth and I discuss many things.’ Raven made a face. ‘I even deign to speak once in a while with the swift silver people who live in the water — but they are dumb and lead lives without interest. I myself am very wise. That is why Mik-api treats me to a smoke now and then.”

There is an annoying arrogance to Raven’s tone that suggests much more than the beneficent spirit guide I’d remembered from the book: “I would guide you down [the mountain] but my wives are irritable for lack of sleep.... You may leave a little of that meat for them. This time of year the pickings are lean.”
At a later meeting, Raven is laughing at a bear stealing a mountain goat that Fool’s Crow, who was napping, shot earlier. “Why didn’t you warn me sooner,” asks Fools Crow of Raven. “You think I haven’t anything better to do, foolish man? I have to hunt for my wives. All day they pester me about not providing for them.” In other passages Raven expresses a lust for Crow women.
Raven does provide Fools Crow with information he needs, but this is not inconsistent with trickster behavior. As Hynes and Doty write, “they are often entertainments involving play or laughter, but they are entertainments that are instructive” (7).
When he wrote this book, a favorite of mine, I doubt that Welch was deliberately trying to create a mythical trickster figure as it has been defined by scholars. I think Welch was just recalling what oral literature he could from his upbringing in an attempt to illustrate some of the sharp cultural differences between American Indians and whites. In the process, though, it seems he resurrected a classic trickster figure.

Thoughts on Trickster

“Every category must have its rubbish heap. For the classic sensibility, the problem is to keep the rubbish at a distance, for the difficulties will arise if it returns, especially if it comes back with a plausible claim to having been falsely excluded to begin with” (Hyde 99).

Trickster figures violate taboos. It has occurred to me that tricksters serve the function in oral and written literatures of satisfying the suppressed urges to violate taboos that are within all of us. Robert S. Ellwood argues that the Japanese god Susa-no-o is a trickster figure. Susa-no-o’s hostile (and foul-mouthed) encounter with his sister is celebrated in a Shinto festival during which men and women hurl insults at each other to their mutual delight. Is this an acting out against a taboo that is the cause of considerable frustration within the Japanese psyche?
When Lewis Hyde related the story of his dream — a man rescues a baby for a grieving mother at whom he rages — it made me think of all dreams and the ambiguous characters who inhabit them. Think about it. Who are these characters who come to us in dreams? They are highly ambiguous, sometimes incorporating the personalities and facial features of more than one person. They are complicated, not all evil nor all good. They change shapes to suit changes in circumstances or merely to fool. They violate taboos and seduce us to do the same — so much so that many of our dreams (most, in fact) are suppressed; we can’t remember them in the morning despite considerable effort.
I wonder if perhaps trickster figures serve the same or similar functions in oral and written literature that dreams serve within our individual psyches — that of relieving pent up frustrations that grow out of our enforced and constant observance of taboos. I guess this invites a Freudian reading of trickster figures.
As social beings, we crave an orderly life. We create that orderly life through elaborate systems of restrictions — laws, social etiquette, religious tenets — that prescribe acceptable behaviors and and make others taboo. Freud theorized that this leads to repressed desires and that the frustrations this causes can become apparent in the form of neuroses and psychoses — if we do not find an outlet for those repressed desires. Dreams serve that function in our day-to-day lives. Literature can also serve that function when we act out our desires vicariously through the actions of fictional characters. Could it be that the trickster figure recurs in literature — across cultures and time — because of its universal taboo-breaking appeal?
The more we read and talk about it, the more (I think) I see it. Was Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s "Light in August" a trickster figure? What about the Wizard in "The Wizard of Oz"? Do authors endow characters in their fiction with trickster qualities (even though they may not recognize them as such) because those qualities have a certain universal appeal?
And what about tricksters in the flesh? Someone suggested that politicians could be defined as trickster figures, but they seem too deliberately manipulative and conniving to fit the bill. (In other words, they don't have the requisite redeeming qualities of the trickster figure.) But what about Mick Jagger? Or R. Crumb, the counterculture cartoonist from the 1960s and ’70s? Do these people function as sort of societal tricksters, breaking the taboos that we can’t, and is that the very basis for their success? Or am I just stating the obvious?

My Life as a Fake

So who’s the fake? Take your pick. A case could be made that each of the characters is a fake in his or her own way. And not to put too fine a point on it, but I found it interesting that a male author (Peter Carey) chose to tell this story in a woman’s (Sarah’s) voice. All novelists are fakes in the sense that they make up stories, but Carey took the extra step of assuming the opposite gender in the telling of this tale, thus committing an additional act of fakery.
Sarah’s lifelong occupation of editing a literary publication and thus creating literature only vicariously makes her a fake. Slater’s cavalier attitude towards his own, mediocre work and his willingness to say anything to suit the occasion casts suspicion on his authenticity. Carey paints Chubb as a basket case of self-delusion, leaving the reader to sort out what’s fake and what’s real — and leaving a fair amount of it unresolved. McCorkle is apparently but a creation of Chubb’s invention, embellished by the Creature’s own psychosis.
If there’s a trickster in the story, I guess it would have to be Chubb. He’s laughable at times, terrifying at other times. He is victim of his own bumbling ways and dark obsessions. He is capable of vile behavior and yet, at other times, almost heroic acts. He wallows in his own poverty and filth at the bicycle shop.
I’m probably reading way too much into the book, but I think perhaps Carey weaves this complex fabric of falsehoods with the intent of showing the reader the extent to which each and every one of us is a fake. We are all fragile constructions of our circumstances -- relationships, occupations, actions, environment, social mores -- with no grounding in anything that could be regarded as absolute.
I’m wondering if that isn’t the purpose of all trickster tales -- to expose the foibles of human nature and to deepen our understanding, if just a little bit, of the human situation.
Dr. Sexson suggested this first journal entry might be a good place to explore the issue of our first lie, the equivalent of the Lewis Hyde’s stolen five-pound note. I’ve really struggled with this. I know I engaged in all sorts of misbehavior as a child, succumbing to dares to shop lift, smoking cigarettes stolen from parents (and getting caught red-handed, hence no opportunity to lie), failing to disclose fully the trouble I got myself into in school. But I don’t remember a single, well-orchestrated, thoroughly planned lie. I don’t think I was very good at it.
I confess I’m having a little trouble getting my arms around the whole idea of the trickster. In the examples I have come across so far, the trickster seems to be predominantly a creation of the oral literature of primitive cultures. I’m wondering if tricksters weren’t (and continue to be?) created as sort of a relief valve to the pressures bought on by life’s frustrations. The trickster breaks all the taboos we wouldn’t dare violate. The trickster is the victim of cruel fortunes in ways that make us laugh. It occurred to me that the Japanese trickster I will talk about in class might have served to lift the tight constraints of a very strict Japanese culture imposed on practitioners of Shintoism.
I am anxious to learn more.